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to bed—and ensuring he joined her there to rumple those bed linens a bit more. He was loath to leave her, but he knew no good would come of his staying.
    Once outside, he called up to the driver, “Carry on. I’ll be walking.”
    He waited until the carriage disappeared up the drive on its way to the carriage house. Then he took a quick turn about the gardens. Nothing amiss. No one hiding in the shadows. He tried to take some comfort from that.
    But he found there was none to be had.
    An hour later he was standing by the fireplace within the Earl of Claybourne’s library. Claybourne and his wife were nestled on a couch together. Frannie Mabry, the Duchess of Greystone, sat in a wingback chair near the one in which Jack Dodger lounged. James Swindler had taken a seat at the outer edge of the circle.
    “It’s half past three in the morning. What the devil is going on?” Claybourne asked.
    “We may have a problem,” Graves told him.
    “What the deuce would that be?”
    “The Duke of Avendale. I fear he may have risen from the dead.”

 

C HAPTER T HREE
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    S ilence greeted his pronouncement, which didn’t surprise him in the least. They’d all played a role in Avendale’s “death.” Graves had provided the charred remains of a corpse, identified as the duke only because it wore the duke’s rings.
    “Are you quite certain that he was sent to the penal colony in New Zealand?” Graves asked.
    “I saw him dragged onto the prison hulk myself,” Claybourne said. He was the one who had captured Avendale, broken his jaw so he couldn’t speak, and delivered him into Swindler’s keeping. “Catherine was with me. She can attest to it.”
    Beside him, his wife looked as though she might be ill. She had conveyed the news to her dear friend that her husband had perished in a fire at Heatherwood. “We stayed until the ship left port.”
    “Is it possible that he found a way to escape and return here?” Graves asked.
    “Anything’s possible,” Swindler said. Working for Scotland Yard, he had access to the gaols and prisons. He had found a fourteen-year-old lad sentenced to transportation to a prison colony. He substituted Avendale for the boy.
    “His sentence was for life, on the far side of the world,” Frannie pointed out. As a child, she’d been fascinated with letters and numbers, endlessly copying them until she could create any style, which made her an excellent forger. She had altered the documents so the description of the person sentenced more closely resembled Avendale. “How would he have managed to find his way back here?”
    “He’s a bloody duke,” Jack reminded them. He had provided employment and a safe haven for the boy they had liberated when they tossed Avendale into the gaol as his replacement. “Once he healed enough to speak coherently, he could offer a fortune to someone willing to help him. As I was not here when you all made the decision to go forward with this swindle, I can’t attest to how well thought out it might have been.”
    “It was very well thought out,” Claybourne said. He turned his attention to William. “All this conjecture seems rather pointless. Why do you think he’s returned?”
    “Because Winnie—” He stopped, cleared his throat. “The Duchess of Avendale believes she’s seen him.”
    Catherine gasped, placing her hand over her mouth. “No, it can’t be. He’ll kill her this time.”
    Suddenly Graves was concerned he was raising the alarm a bit prematurely. It did seem unlikely that the man could escape and make his way back here. “She can’t be sure. She saw him at a distance, thought it was a ghost. But there are other things. Items being moved around. His scent wafting through the house. Things she can’t explain.”
    “She’s told me none of this.”
    “She feared she was going mad.”
    “Perhaps she is,” Jack said. “If he did manage to return, I think he would march into his residence and announce that he had bloody well